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Skip James (1902-1969)

Can't Find No Heaven

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 21, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi. His father was a converted bootlegger turned preacher. As a youth, James heard local musicians such as Henry Stuckey and brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims and began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road construction and levee-building crews in his native Mississippi in the early 1920s, and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, Illinois Blues, about his experiences as a laborer. Later in the 1920s he sharecropped and made bootleg whiskey in the Bentonia area. He began playing guitar in open D-minor tuning and developed a three-finger picking technique that he would use to great effect on his recordings. In addition, he began to practice piano-playing, drawing inspiration from the Mississippi blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery. In early 1931, James auditioned for Jackson, Mississippi record shop owner and talent scout H. C. Speir, who placed blues performers with a variety of record labels including Paramount Records. On the strength of this audition, Skip James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin to record for Paramount. James's 1931 work is considered uniquely idiosyncratic among pre-war blues recordings, and forms the basis of his reputation as a musician. Several of the Grafton recordings, such as Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, Devil Got My Woman, Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader, and 22-20 Blues (the basis for Robert Johnson's better-known 32-20 Blues), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James's Paramount 78s have survived. The Great Depression struck just as James' recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father's church. For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969. Skip James' sound was unique to the blues genre and although he influenced other blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson, few have been able to recreate his style. His high pitched voice seems otherworldly and frail, even in his early recordings. He is said to have had a 'preaching' style of singing and was known to also sing spirituals. James is regarded as a gifted and distinctive guitarist. He often used an open D-minor tuning (DADFAD) which gave his instrument a dark and desolate tone. James reportedly learned this tuning from his musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesman Henry Stuckey. Stuckey in turn was said to have acquired it from Bahamanian soldiers during the First World War. The famed Robert Johnson also recorded in this "Bentonia" tuning, his Hell Hound On My Trail being based on the James opus Devil Got My Woman. James' classically-informed, finger-picking style was fast and clean, using the entire register of the guitar with heavy, hypnotic bass lines. (quoted from wikipedia.org.)

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